A Work In Progress

Chapter Eighteen: A Passing

As it has a tendency to do, time started to pass. Winter rolled into the City, and I found myself becoming less thoughtful about the things that were different before the little coven met to change my life. I was spending more and more time on the weekends trying to find anyone who might be able to help me, but anyone that did not laugh, or look to see if I was an armed whack-job, gave me the same answer. The coven would have to be reassembled. I did get a few that told me the spell would eventually wear off, so until then I would have to learn to live with it.

Learning to live with it, I was, but I had started to avoid going out. I was learning to cook. I was spending time watching TV and surfing on the internet and redecorating my apartment. I was doing as much of the work I could, myself. It was rewarding to turn the place into a nice comfortable place to exist. The trouble was that I was feeling something I had never felt before, loneliness.

Work was still about the same. I was technically working for Phillip and he was doing even less than he had before. I was keeping records of everything I did that he should have, knowing that Karlsen would call Phillip’s doing nothing delegation, but I was keeping a record of my work because I knew when Phillip failed that he would blame someone else. I was ready to defend myself when that happened.

Mari and I would go out together at least once a month, but she was more and more unhappy in her marriage. She was sure her husband was sleeping around on her, and I would comfort her. The hard part for me was not telling her that from all that she was telling me he was doing that she was right. She was a good woman and a devoted wife and he should be ashamed of himself. What he was doing was something for himself. He would, like I would have, find a way to make his lack of faithfulness her fault when it was all his. Or there was the other old stand-by I had used with my fellow men, when I was one, that it was just something that happened and until the act was over, there was no realization of what happened. This was, of course, pure bullshit. I knew anytime I had cheated on a woman that I was cheating on her. At the moment of cheating, though, I did not care how it hurt her. It seemed ridiculous to me now, thinking back on the many times it had started a fight, that I could have made it, to me in any case, sound almost the same as tripping over a rug. You did not accidentally screw someone. You choose it.

Now my best friend was being cheated on and I wanted to make it better for her but… I just did not know how.

I also found myself flirting more and more with poor Ralph. He was a crushingly shy man, I was finding out and also brilliant. He was sweet and nice and I liked him. He was safe to flirt with and seemed to enjoy it. I felt so very bad about how I had treated him before I was changed, but, like Mari, I could not tell him the whole of it. Neither of them would remember me as a man and I would loose them both as anchors in this new world of hooting workmen, honking cars, and leering stares. Being a woman was not at all how I had pictured it. I found that I was far more aware of a person’s tone of voice than I had ever been. I was more open to all my emotions now. The main draw backs were the things I had never thought of or had always looked for in a woman. My back was always achy at the end of a long day thanks to the added weight of my breasts and the monthly cycle was not at all how the commercials on TV made it seem. It was a pain, it was messy, and it was never ever convenient. Luckily I was regular with it, so I knew it was coming and had not been caught off guard like the first time.

Well, I had once, but not since then.

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